Anyone else feel displeased about the lack of explicit mission stories in Ambrose Island?

Hitman 3 (2021) Ambrose Island
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I realise this forum is more for hardcore fans and so explicit mission stories might not be particularly popular here, but damn the lack of it makes me sad, as more of a casual-ish player. I tried turning it off before and it wasn’t fun for me since I don’t have hours to explore things by myself. I like how explicit mission stories give me a tour of the map and teach me the things I can do there, which is especially important for Freelancer (which I feel is the real test of my skills and knowledge).

It would have been nice if it remained an option like the rest of the maps (except for Berlin which I understand thematically), instead of omitting it entirely. I hope they add it in in a future update.

For example, I didn’t even know Akka could kill Crest? The only implicit mission stories I found were the chef poisoning one for Crest, and Agent Smith’s cage for Akka. That’s about it.

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Fair to say.

Of what would have been mission stories in Hitman 2016 (where everything slightly involved/with unique dialogue was a mission story), Ambrose has :

  • Slap competition/recruitment for Crest
  • Chef poisoning for Crest
  • Boat repair/sparks for Crest
  • Sabotage communication/bridge for Crest
  • Hippie meeting for Akka
  • Agent Smith’s cage for Akka
  • Hsu confrontation for both
  • Radar tower lights for both
  • Drop from the loosen mounting in the ruins for the Satellite Control
  • The cave, grate/screwdriver, wire/knife, overload for the Satellite Control

Most of them are too short for what is seemingly the threshold for being a mission story in Hitman 3.
Since most are just one disguise-one action, or do multiple things but in only one area. Which is not only not involved enough for an Hitman 3 story mission, but wouldn’t have made the map tour, a part of H3 mission story design you smartly saw.

But it’s true that there are at least three that could have. Maybe. The Hsu one is the largest one. Along the radar tower light (which embeds itself inside the Hsu scripts). I even kinda think that it was supposed to be one, because you have Grey talking about it during it the way a mission story normally works.
I think the boat repair one also has some voice over.

All of them also has a challenge attached, sometimes multiple one along their steps. So players still have some guidance and other nudges.

I don’t really know why they completely forgo the mission story structure though.

Maybe it was because the mission was made with veteran players on their mind (which would explain some of the more obscure possibilities in the mission design, like putting an explosive in a briefcase, knowing that the cave stash when found is next to and in range of the Satellite Control Unit, a mechanic that once appeared in a cut challenge on Isle of Sgail)

Maybe it was because the most involved “hidden mission story”, Hsu and meeting, has multiple triggers and branches, and so forgoing the rather rigid structure of mission story would allow for more fluid exploration of the possibilities designed. (some not even in challenges: you can put the Hsu photo on Akka desk without all the previous hoop with the bar owner, you can trigger the radar tower lights with a sniper…).
I think that it also made the mission story end points infallible. There are always ways to start them as long as the target themselves are still alive.

So it’s this blend of scripts either too short to be mission story, or too complex and open to be be made justice if guided. A bridge too far is the only one i can see between the two, maybe with the vanilla radar tower lights meeting.

In general late Hitman 3 went with a deconstruction of its own mechanics. Like how the hippie hidden story mission ends with the target not calling her guards to leave, and them still watching over her, 47, and any sabotage during the meeting. So it might just be that.

Finally: welcome to the forum @IgnisIncendio ! :slight_smile:
Sorry your first reply is a wall of text.

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Thank you for the warm welcome, @LandirtHome! It’s fine, I’m happy to have started this conversation in hopefully a cordial manner. Your post contains a lot of info that I didn’t know about.

From my experience: I didn’t even know Hsu existed, I tried doing the bar quest but got stuck at trying to find the buried cigar box. I did the radar tower lights thing; that one was a pretty obvious one since Grey tells you about it, but I tried blowing them up with a duck, which turns out to only knock Crest out instead of killing them. Today, from the Internet, I learnt about the cannon.

Though, from your post, it makes me feel a bit better. Because I see that I didn’t actually miss as much as I thought I did. For example, I thought there was an implicit mission story that destroys the Satellite Control (e.g. Hostile Environment from Sapienza), but from your description it sounds pretty straightforward and direct. I also thought Hsu was just someone you had to stumble upon which would have been pretty ludicrous, but given it was at the end of the bar quest which I didn’t manage to complete (due to not being able to find the cigar box; and not because I didn’t try, I ran around the entire map trying to find it), that makes a bit more sense.

The shorter scripts make sense that it’s not a mission story; rather just Intels. For the more complex ones though, I think it would still make sense for it to be a mission story with the most obvious path – then the other ways of triggering it would be a “wow, you could do it like that too?!” sort of thing.

Haha yeah, that’s awesome. It’s really funny how lots of earlier mission stories end with the target asking for some privacy from the guards.

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Ambrose Island appears as a culmination of 20 yrs in expertise in map making for Hitman. It is an excellent map with so many different choke points for entry and exit.

There are not a lot of unique environmental assets in the map.
There are mission stories, but not as extensive as say, Paris.

IOI probably did not invest as much in the extra stuff to flesh out the map.

Ambrose Island was a free map available post Hitman 3 launch, probably designed with Freelancer in mind – for extra map variety since many of the maps are not usable in Freelancer such as the New Zealand map or Carpathian Mountains or Training Facility maps.

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No.

There’s hints on them all via the challenges and it feels like natural progression from the other H3 locations where there were more unguided mission stories than ever before that were completely left to the player to figure out.

Its a fun final test of everything you’ve learned playing through all the other locations in the game.

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Welcome to the forum @IgnisIncendio :slightly_smiling_face:

I don’t know whether IOI will add further mission stories to Ambrose in the future to be fair. In my personal opinion, I think Year 4 will be the final year of main content for the game before IOI switches full focus to Bond. I know IOI still have a small team working on Hitman WOA, but I’m assuming that team will finish off Year 4 before joining focus on Bond? I might be wrong though? For the remainder of Year 4 content, I think we’ll see new challenges added, weapons/unlocks, bug fixes and more potential content for Freelancer alongside some new Elusive Targets. I don’t think we’ll have new additions to the Campaign aspect of the game, but who knows? :grin:

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My theory is that IO wanted Grey and 47 to talk in mission stories, but since Bateson was busy with…let’s go with the Mario Movie, they couldn’t get him in to record his half of the voice over and had to change their plans accordingly. Shame too, I would’ve liked some snarking and banter between clones.

The theory is not as far-fetched as you may think either; Grey is quite talkative here, which would’ve worked well with their brotherly dynamic.

I do find it interesting that, for all the hate Mission Stories get, people do seem to like them when you play a level for the first time (which given how big these games are now, makes a lot of sense), and when people removed them, it got noticed and was criticised for it.

Also, welcome to the forum!

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Thanks for the welcome!

To be honest, I think this might be the classic situation where “the opinions you hear are from the hardcore fans” kind of thing. Though, only IOI knows how many players actually use it. Who knows, maybe a substantial amount of people actually do turn it off, since it asks you if you want to turn it off in The Final Test.

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It’s weird because there are definitely mission stories, whether it’s setting up the meeting, causing a slap fight, Agent Smith, or that whole fruit collection (I think it was coconuts?) thing. The only difference is that the game doesn’t guide you to them.

As someone who had played the trilogy for a while until that point, I even felt a bit lost going in for the first time. I can only imagine how overwhelming it would be to newer players.

I think what it has is fine though as there are a lot of story-like kill opportunities, I just wish it had them as explicit mission stories rather than being slightly hidden!

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I personally liked the idea. this is Hitman’s deepest cut, a bonus map interquel released years after everything else and hidden in the destinations tab. hell it aint even on the live tab or home page anymore! so only solidified hitman experts are going to be touching it, so i think the choice was appropriate and i like the idea of this being a potential way mission stories could go in the future. i imagine a Hitman 9 where the first half is elaborate Dartmoor-style mission stories that handhold you into these cool scenarios and then slowly they start to do Ambrose-style stories where youre given the pieces and have to make the connections

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